Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz

Sometimes

She wanted to keep believing in him but sometimes it was hard when she couldn’t sleep because she was afraid—it got so dark—and she kept checking the candle, her finger to her mouth, to the wick, and then checking again for the slightest flicker or the baby cried and cried with a fervor that wouldn’t be doused by water, little in the cabinets or in her or sometimes the landlord would corner her, press himself against her still swollen belly and say maybe it was time they talked about the rent.

—First appeared in the late, great Ghoti

CP

Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz lives somewhere in the United States. She blogs about her life at gwennotes.blogspot.com and about her writing life at wwwonewriter.blogspot.com.

Emma Ozeren

The Bear

There was something soft and heavy in the plastic bag.

“It’s for your project,” said my father. “I got it at a yard sale.” The way in front was lit by our headlights, blinking tree, tree, road. A flash of forest eyes. I upended the bag and a puddle of fur slid out, like a scrap of old coat.

“For your project. At school. The bear project. It was bears, wasn’t it?”

I nodded, picking the thing up. It was slightly oily, strangely live.

“Do you think it’ll be useful?” my father asked, as we swung down the hill to my mother’s house.

“Yes,” I said, and in the dark my father smiled.


In the final year of elementary school, everyone did an Animal Study. The best won a prize. I already had three lever-arched files of double-sided pages, much of it copied—no, transcribed, as painstakingly as any monk’s illuminated manuscript—from library books. This was okay; we were eleven and not expected to be original. My contents page started solidly, sensibly: BEAR types, BEAR food, BEAR wear where.

“This is very good,” said my mother, helping me with the spelling.

Then the list wandered off somewhat, rummaging into whatever tangential sub-topics had lately caught my interest. Bear-hunting, bear-baiting, sun bears’ bile. How the Kodiak bear might look in our classroom, eating children (very big, and I’d cracked open a red ink cartridge to show the blood).

“I’m not so sure about this,” said my mother.

And now: the bear.

Or what was left of a bear. Its vacant eye sockets looked though me. It was a bear’s face, but  flat, empty, like a bear mask.  I held it up by its ragged ears, and the mouth-hole gaped—a terrible bear mask, for serial-killers and shamen and lunatics running naked through the night communing with Ursa Major.

“Did you have a proper dinner?” asked my mother, after dad had driven off. “What’s that?”

“It’s for my Animal Study,” I said, running upstairs with a belly full of strawberry ice-cream and the bear safely wadded in its bag.


My father always had a talent for wrong presents, and my mother a gift for discovering them: cut-price Walkmans that knitted tape ribbons, wonk-wheeled roller-boots, jewelry that left green stains. The next time I saw him, when he asked, I made sure to emphasize the bear’s great contribution to my project. And I debated for weeks how to include it. Bagged and labeled, like evidence? A carpet-sample swatch, nicely mounted on card? A grisly book-cover?


In the end I hid it in the cellar, because I could see it wasn’t right. At eleven, I knew there was a difference between well-intentioned and useful. My father went traveling that summer, when we handed in our Animal Studies, and he was still away when they gave me the prize, and by the time he got back the whole thing was long forgotten. I stuffed the bear in a box of bead-eyed pastel animals headed for the attic. One day soon I’ll bring it down to scare the children, and tell them what their grandfather was like, and how I wish they’d met him.

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Emma Ozeren is thirty and lives in Los Angeles.

Jeannine Allard

Pillow Talk

You wear the crown of the pillow queen, my
lover said to me the first time we awakened
together. She had

expressions like that for everything, and
I thought, how lovely, to be able to stitch
together the events of one’s days with words that

sing. Our nights were filled with these songs, her
name sang on my tongue; to be able to see the world
through a prism of language that

confers dignity on it. And I, for whom words are
my daily bread, was left speechless by her voice.
Speechless by everything,

were I to tell the truth, for her world perceptions were
simple: we make our own happiness, we find our own
joy, and I think of my mother

drinking behind a closed door, forever angry, forever
disappointed, and I wonder what she would have made
of my lover, this woman who decided on her own

what to get out of life. Life happened to my mother,
and she blamed it on those around her, including her
child. We all carry the scars

of our pasts, it’s just that some of us carry them
more lightly than others. My lover said that people
don’t fit into boxes, they must be experienced

and accepted and I wondered how much of her wisdom
I’d absorb. The French city where I grew up, its
constant reminders of old pain

and old alliances and how many times does a person
need to say she’s sorry before she can forgive herself?
But in the darkness and warmth

of my lover’s room all hurts could be forgiven, where
sweet flesh was the offering made to the goddesses of
love and gentle kisses dispelled the coldness

of the world outside, where my wild messy hair could have
conferred on it words of beauty and pleasure and
life could be faced

with an equally wild and messy optimism
that can enable someone to see a crown
where others see only tangles.

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Jeannine Allard is a novelist who lives at Land's End—at the
tip of Cape Cod. More information at www.JeannineAllard.com.

Meg Pokrass

 

Sit In Here

A little drunk, we share a cigarette. So cold and clear that stars pop like bugs in the sky and my right ear hurts with a crashing kind of pain.

The sledding hill looks lumpy and it bothers me. He tosses his coat on the snow as though it were a beach towel, plunks down, and says for me to sit.

"You," he says, "Sit in here."

He opens his legs, and I sit up against him like a wall while he warms my ear with those piano fingers curling over. I try not to dwell on my mother's breast and how they will take it off. I let my mind do things and then I stop it from happening but it happens.

He lives in dreams with me but he wants that to end. This feels like a scene in a movie which comes somewhere in the middle, when the popcorn tastes not so perfect.

He hates coming home to this, he says, he's always known how the town cancers and folds around exits. I'll follow him into a deep blue anything to get the fuck out.

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Meg Pokrass's first collection of flash fiction, Damn Sure Right, is available at http://www.press53.com/BioMegPokrass.html. Meg writes flash fiction, prose poetry and makes story animations. She serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review). She designs and runs the Fictionaut-Five author interview series for Fictionaut.  You can read and learn more about Meg at http://www.megpokrass.org.

JP Reese

Abstinence

I’ve sipped for days to slake a thirst
I never thought I’d have again.

Each day I wake as currents thrum
through blood and flesh, untempered heart.

I banish flame—swallow the truth,
dispatch it to a southern sky,

and still my longing burns your likeness
in his dark and watchful eyes.


Play

Remove the silver slippers and slip them in a pocket safe from sin.
Your slip slides against silken skin as you climb the slippery stairs
of the child's slide to slide down until your toes touch tawny sand.
Slip between the swings and sunset surf to take another sip of gin.
Try to fill the hollow space inside your chest that harbors hidden grief.
A lie slid off your tongue to leave you single, standing solo here below
the slanted sun. A sweet and slippery stranger slides aside your slip
with hands so soft you barely even notice you are lost.

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JP Reese teaches English at a small college in Texas. Her writing has appeared in Thunderclap, Connotation Press, The Smoking Poet, Eclectic Flash, Used Furniture Review, Blue Fifth Review, Gloom Cupboard, Corium Magazine and other fine places. She is a poetry editor for THIS Literary Magazine.